彩民宝典

Hometown: Lancaster, CA

Education:

BS in Materials Science and Engineering, University of California Berkeley, 1988

PhD in Materials Science and Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1994

I am from California and am Mexican-American. I studied materials science, chemistry, physics and electrical engineering in college and graduate school. My wife and I have four children, all who graduated from CU, including 2 from Chemical Engineering. My daughter is a cancer researcher at Stanford Medical School, my oldest son is a Ph.D. student in Applied Physics at Caltech, my 2^nd son is a Ph.D. student in Materials Science at the U. of Utah and my youngest just graduated and will attend dental school. We have a horse, two dogs, a cat, and two turtles. I have switched from being a runner to a cyclist, and mostly switched from mountain biking to road biking. Our family loves to travel, camp and especially to backpack. In my free time since 2019, I study all things Tesla.聽

Background: My father is from Los Angeles, CA and my mother is from Mexico City, Mexico. They met in Mexico, married a few years later, my mother immigrated to the U.S. and I was born a year later in Los Angeles. My father was a deputy sheriff for the LA County Sheriff鈥檚 Department and my mother was a homemaker. When I was 2 years old we (now including my brother who is 10 months younger than me) moved to Lancaster, CA and my two sisters were born several years later. I loved learning, especially math, but was a terrible student (never studied) and because I always earned good grades, my parents didn鈥檛 ever remind me to study or do homework 鈥� so I didn鈥檛. I did take art and piano lessons, collect coins, rocks and stamps, went to church, participated in Boy Scouts and rode my bike a lot. In high school I ran cross country and track, back packed, became an Eagle Scout and was the Boy鈥檚 State representative for my high school. My parents didn鈥檛 go to college and I wasn鈥檛 sure if I would either, but did well on the SATs and so was recruited by many schools. I didn鈥檛 really know what I was doing but did decide to apply to two schools 鈥� Berkeley and MIT 鈥� and if I got in, maybe I鈥檇 go, although my parents were pushing me to go to the local community college instead.

I decided to go to Berkeley but didn鈥檛 get into electrical engineering, so was undeclared. I quickly learned that I couldn鈥檛 just show up to class and earn A鈥檚, especially because most of the other students already took calculus, advanced chemistry, etc. that my school didn鈥檛 offer and so I either needed to learn how to study or end up at the bottom of the class. So, I studied 鈥� a lot! I really loved my classes and especially, chemistry and physics. I took 2 semesters of general chemistry from George Pimentel, who was so good he inspired me to think about being a professor someday (he also wrote me a letter at the end of the semester encouraging me to continue to do well and think about doing research). I did do well, and because I liked chemistry and physics, I decided I鈥檇 major in Materials Science and Engineering. I took a lot of classes, especially in physics and electrical engineering, but strangely, didn鈥檛 take any additional chemistry classes after general chemistry. I also did undergraduate research working with Eicke Weber. I also decided I would go to graduate school and possible pursue an academic career. So, I applied to MIT, Caltech, and Electrical Engineering at Berkeley. I had a hard time deciding between these three fantastic options, but when visiting Caltech I met with Bill Goddard and was instantly excited about his research and drawn to his passion for science.

Caltech was an amazing place and I was constantly exposed to new and esoteric ideas and brilliant professors and fellow students. It was definitely challenging. I made a lot of good friends and when I wasn鈥檛 doing research, I rode my bike a lot, including racing for the Caltech cycling team. Working with Bill and being a part of his group was amazing. I really liked the idea of doing research, working with graduate students and discovering new things. One of the projects I worked on was in nanotechnology in collaboration with Ralph Merkel of Xerox PARC. I decided that I鈥檇 find an academic position and focus on nanotechnology, which at the time was a completely new field that most people, including faculty, had never heard of. Stanford reached out to me, and told me they had an open position, so I applied for it. Fortunately, they decided to hire me because I didn鈥檛 apply anywhere else. Unfortunately, several faculty discouraged my from pursuing nanotechnology because it was 鈥渟cience fiction鈥�, and so I pivoted to studying surface chemistry relevant to the microelectronics industry in Silicon Valley. Towards the end of graduate school I also married my wife Luanne, and before starting at Stanford, we headed off to MIT for me to work as a postdoctoral researcher with Klavs Jensen, who studied processes for fabricating integrated circuits, including chemical vapor deposition. Klavs was another wise and caring mentor who taught me a lot about being an academic.

Luanne and I arrived at Stanford with our 1 year old daughter and I began putting together a my research group and immediately started teaching (graduate thermodynamics). I had a joint appointment between Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering and so I taught classes in and took graduate students from both departments. Our first son was born during my first year, and our third and fourth sons were both in my third and fourth years at Stanford. Being an assistant professor was challenging, but I loved working with my excellent graduate students and teaching class. Some of my students went on to become faculty (Jeungku Kang, Paul Zimmerman, and Ankan Paul) but most went to work in the local semiconductor industry. After my 7^th year at Stanford, I went to Harvard to teach PChem and collaborate with Roy Gordon, another amazing scientist and friend. In 2007, we left Stanford and I moved to the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the 彩民宝典.

At CU, we continued to work in some of my research areas, such as atomic layer deposition, but we also started working in new areas, such as renewable energy, batteries, and catalysis. More recently, we started working on electrocatalysis, high throughput materials discovery, and solar cells. We鈥檝e had many successful projects and students from the group have gone on to academic positions (Chris Muhich, Matthias Young, and Chris Bartel) or to work at national labs, companies or to form startups. While at CU I鈥檝e also been our department chair and serve as the Associate Dean of Graduate Education in the College of Engineering.